Why Glendale Galleria matters.
Glendale Galleria is a foundational regional shopping center where Downtown Glendale's commercial scale meets multi-level retail architecture, interconnected interior courts and a complex extending across several city blocks.
Set along West Broadway near South Central Avenue and just steps from The Americana at Brand, the shopping center occupies a substantial section of Downtown Glendale between Brand Boulevard and Columbus Avenue. The 1.6-million-square-foot complex combines broad interior concourses, multiple department-store volumes and vertically stacked retail floors within a footprint assembled across successive phases. Entrances along Broadway, Central Avenue and Brand Boulevard distribute movement through different portions of the property, giving the building several distinct points of contact with the surrounding downtown streets. Escalators, upper-level crossings and large central openings connect its floors internally, creating long sightlines through a shopping center whose size extends far past a single atrium or corridor. The result is a dense urban retail complex whose multi-block footprint, layered circulation and numerous street connections place a major enclosed shopping center directly inside Glendale's downtown grid.
What defines Glendale Galleria.
Glendale Galleria is best known for becoming the centerpiece of a major 1970s downtown redevelopment campaign and an early career-defining project for architect Jon Adams Jerde. Glendale created its redevelopment agency in 1972 after years of declining retail market share, sales and property values, then assembled 28 acres in the southern portion of downtown for a large commercial intervention. The Redevelopment Agency approved a $75 million regional shopping center in March 1973, with Glendale Associates, formed by J.S. Griffiths Co., Broadway Hale Stores and M.J. Brock & Sons, advancing the private development. Jerde, then vice president and director of design for Charles Kober Associates, conceived an interior of angled paths resembling a gently winding street, an approach he connected with a Ray Bradbury essay concerned with reviving retail districts. Buffums and The Broadway began trading in August 1976 before the main center opened that October, followed by Ohrbach's and JCPenney during the opening period. Ninety-five percent of tenant spaces had been leased by opening, and the center's immediate commercial strength generated expansion planning within two years. Glendale selected the original developer's proposal for a 555,200-square-foot second phase representing a 50 percent increase in size, supported in part by a $6.7 million Urban Development Action Grant. Symonds/Feola/Deenihan Architects designed Galleria II with red-brick facades corresponding to the first phase, and the addition brought Nordstrom and Mervyn's into the center when it opened in 1983. The combined development became a powerful economic engine for Glendale, generating $3.59 million in city sales-tax revenue during 1989-90, equivalent to 18 percent of the municipal total that year.
Commercial innovations subsequently gave Glendale Galleria a separate place in the histories of several national companies. Andrew and Peggy Cherng opened the first Panda Express there in 1983, a decade after Andrew and his father, Master Chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, had founded Panda Inn in Pasadena; Peggy developed operating systems for the new fast-service concept, and Panda Express had surpassed 100 locations by 1993. Apple selected Glendale Galleria and Tysons Corner in Virginia for its first two company retail stores, both opening on May 19, 2001 as Steve Jobs began a 25-store national rollout. Those two locations drew more than 7,700 people and generated $599,000 in combined merchandise sales during their first weekend, placing Glendale inside a retail strategy that later became central to Apple's consumer presence. Another retail milestone arrived in 2007 when Target converted a 180,000-square-foot former Robinsons-May space into the chain's first three-floor store. General Growth Properties launched a comprehensive architectural renewal in 2012 after securing Bloomingdale's for the former Mervyn's location, commissioning ELS Architecture and Urban Design as executive architect in association with Kevin Kennon Architects. New flooring, ceilings, lighting, wayfinding, exterior entrances, vertical transportation and Central Avenue bridge cladding accompanied the intervention, with SWA responsible for landscape architecture and RSM Design for graphics. The renewed center and its new Bloomingdale's debuted in November 2013, extending Glendale Galleria's commercial history from Jerde's formative retail architecture into later chapters tied to Panda Express, Apple, Target and a substantial twenty-first-century reinvestment.
How Glendale Galleria fits.
Glendale Galleria works as the anchor for a Downtown Glendale outing connecting electric-sign preservation, Southern California movie-palace architecture and Welton Becket's postwar civic design.
Begin at Museum of Neon Art, founded in 1981 by artists Lili Lakich and Richard Jenkins as a nonprofit institution devoted to electric and kinetic art, historic neon signs and the specialized craft behind their fabrication. More than three decades of exhibitions and preservation work preceded the museum's move to Glendale, where its permanent Brand Boulevard home opened in February 2016 with It's About Time, an exhibition of neon clocks; Glenn B. Ward photographs of Glendale neon from the 1940s and 1950s; and Illuminations, bringing contemporary neon and kinetic artists into the same opening program. Continue to Alex Theatre, designed by Arthur G. Lindley and Charles R. Selkirk and opened in 1925 as the Alexander Theatre, a vaudeville and motion-picture house with Greek, Roman and Egyptian revival decoration inside an atmospheric auditorium. Architect S. Charles Lee dramatically recast its street presence in 1940 through an Art Deco and Streamline Moderne marquee, canopy and 100-foot neon tower crowned by a sparkling sphere. The Glendale Redevelopment Agency acquired the theater in 1992, financed a $6.5 million rehabilitation and reopened it on New Year's Eve 1993 as a performing-arts center; National Register recognition followed in 1996. Conclude at Glendale Central Library, a 92,600-square-foot Brutalist civic building designed by Welton Becket and Associates and opened in 1973. Its local-history holdings preserve photographs, maps, periodicals, newspapers and other resources tracing Glendale's development, giving the building an archival role alongside its architectural importance. A major 2017 renovation renewed the building, followed by a later Johnson Favaro project for children, teen and sound-production areas financed through $6.095 million in state-budget funding, $5.7 million from California's Building Forward program and $2.5 million from Glendale's Measure S. The progression moves from Lakich and Jenkins's preservation of Southern California neon through Lindley, Selkirk and Lee's evolving movie palace and culminates in Welton Becket's Brutalist civic architecture, connecting three distinct chapters of Glendale's artistic and architectural development.
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